Bibliometric trend analysis of non-conventional (alternative) therapies in veterinary research.

There is an increased interest in Non-Conventional Therapies (NCTs), often referred to as complementary and alternative medicines, in veterinary clinical practice. To map the bibliometric outputs of NCTs in veterinary medicine, and identify which are most prevalent, and the extent to which their publishing has increased. Text mining algorithms were applied to detect 17 NCTs-related terms (, , , , , , , , , , , , , and ) in the title, abstract or keywords of all retrievable literature until 2020 under the PubMed MeSH term 'veterinary' ( = 377 556). Point prevalence, incidence by decade and cumulative incidence were calculated. Bibliometric trend analysis revealed an overall increase in NCTs-related terms over the last 20 years, with a substantial growth of studies mentioning , and , and have also increased in the same period, although their numbers remain low. Conversely, reference to has decreased in the last decade when compared with the previous decade, whereas references to , , and remained scarce, suggesting that their use in veterinary clinical practice may not be based on published evidence. Further reviews to explore this issue are warranted, differentiating secondary from primary literature, and assessing relevance and methodological quality of individual studies, following the principles of evidence-based veterinary medicine.